Posts by Defrag

  • Editorial: Did HL1 Ruin HL2?

    I dread to think what kind of new bugs and other problems the HDR stuff will bring . I've heard scare-stories about having to dick about with a lot of content to get it working with HDR.. but I guess we have to just wait and see. There's already the cubemap problem, and an update a few months back made my hammer crash when HL2 was open.. It roughly coincided with the release that put in some of the Source engine support for DoD:S features before DoD:S actually shipped.

    It's cool that valve keep adding stuff to their engines, but it'd be nice if they fixed up the old stuff and made it more useable first. The very fact that Valve encapsulated some of the SDK and pretty much all of the HL2 resources in .gcf files and didn't bother offering us a .gcf file-reading application was probably a fair hint from the start that modding was going to be a pain in the arse.

  • Editorial: Did HL1 Ruin HL2?

    I totally agree that Source is a pain in the arse to work with.

    [*]
    [*:3kv26vr0] The SDK is horribly convoluted.
    [*:3kv26vr0] There is a huge lack of documentation, and much of what we have is community-created, not even piggy-backing on official morsels from valve.
    [*:3kv26vr0] Steam encapsulation has created more problems than it has solved. The organisational problems in particular make me want to scream. I remember wanting to punch a baby in the face the first time I had to compile my own prop. Yeah, having about 3 huge directory structures is very convenient, as is the fact that models require everything to be in the corresponding directory, then the models don't even generate a single packed file, they generate multiple files.
    [*:3kv26vr0] Steam updates break my Hammer every second update (always fun going through the 'solution' of resetting your game configurations and remaking them)
    [*:3kv26vr0] Hammer is a six year old editor masquerading as a 'modern' level design tool. The familiarity and continuity is great, but anyone that is honest with themselves knows that it's antiquated and hampers work flow.
    [*:3kv26vr0] The devil is in the detail. Unfortunately, detailing in Hammer is horrendously painful. There's no lighting preview, and Hammer crashes when run in tandem with HL2 for a lot of people (moreso during the last few months, when it has started happening to me). The model viewer built into hammer is a JOKE. You find what you're looking for by eventually memorising all the useful props, not by actually using any kind of intuitive interface. Valve's naming conventions are also confusing. Lights folders with no lights in them. Pipes folders with gutters in them. Pipes in other folders. Duplicate textures.. tool textures that don't have any functionality. No wonder the game took five years to make.[/list]I could go on. I feel like strongbad at times, it's like trying to make a game while wearing boxing gloves.

    My primary reservation is the fact that valve's idea of 'community support' for mod teams was to document a fraction of HL2's features, then create a wiki and offload the responsibility. How do they expect the mod community to flourish with such half-assed support?

    I agree with much of what eric said regarding people becoming too precious about mods, rather than treating them as rough & ready then iteratively releasing, but people have become more conscious and, dare I say it, precious about their work. Part of this reason is due to people's expectations shifting. Look at dystopia. How many of us played it and then dismissed it because it had a lot of really rough parts that we couldn't see past? I know I did. I filed it in the "has potential" folder and then never played it again. If someone plays your mod and finds it lacks a hook or is average, the chances are they'll never play it again unless everyone else starts playing it.

    Also: The main problem with mapping nowadays is a lack of high profile review sites. Radium, anyone? The guy could be an asshole at times, but his site pulled everything together, particularly for HLDM and TFC in their infancy. I remember when I used to eagerly log on to his site to check out the latest maps.. the days of scary_1 and the_cheese pumping out maps prolifically, and it inspired me to get started. Now what do we have? Pretty much nothing in terms of high profile review sites. There's no well-known one-stop-shop for mapping goodness.

    Bit of a rambling post, but IMO the Source engine itself is the main reason that there's a serious lack of quality stuff out there. You can't increase the complexity of technology and raise expectations, then back it up with a horribly designed SDK with little documentation.

  • EA hires Steven Spielberg

    Well, look at games like HL2. Story-driven and cinematic games are on the up, and the technology is rapidly developing. We're now at a stage where developers can employ real-time techniques that were only available to movie producers just a year or two back... so I guess part of the video games market colliding with the film market is inevitable. It'll be interesting to see how this pans out.

  • totally random texture thread

    First ever attempt at a texture, it tiles (thanks to mapcore texture tutorial links ) but I have to get rid of some of the repition and also fix the colour balance a little. The bottom also needs some detail to connect it to the ground. Added some detail here and there and used an overlay texture to give it a little more variety. Photosourced obviously, I'm a newb and can't draw anything.

    Updated slightly. I cloned out the left upper brick's vertical join and added a bit of colour to the other parts.

    [Blocked Image: http://img213.imageshack.us/img213/91/wall28uh.jpg]

    Old:

    http://img371.imageshack.us/img371/6792/wall6em.jpg

  • Your portfolio repels jobs

    I have to agree on the "Flashy" sites made by artists. I've had to go through a lot of portfolio sites to find people for our mod, and some of the sites were so badly made by people trying to appear unique / as if they think outside the box that I just gave up and closed the site. Primary hate is sites that have images with parts you click, but it's not clear which parts are clickable, or what they represent. I even had one site where there were random characters all over the place, and you clicked a character that took you to a link, but it didn't tell you what the link was. I wanted to punch the idiot that made the site. I also agree about the image branding stuff. People never put pertinent information in a filename when they submit them, and the images are rarely branded either. I just handle recruitment for a mod and I get maddened by it, so professional recruiters are probably 100x more irritable.